


your eyes look like coming home.

by LovelyVerisimilitude



Series: character studies. [1]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Attempt at Humor, Camp Half-Blood (Percy Jackson), Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mutual Pining, Not Beta Read, POV Annabeth Chase, Pre-The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:08:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25867945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyVerisimilitude/pseuds/LovelyVerisimilitude
Summary: “Hey, can you hear that?” Annabeth asks, cupping a palm to her ear.Percy frowns, leaning his head to the side. It’s adorable. In an aggravating, irritating way. “Hear what?”"The sound of me ignoring every stupid word you say.”(CAMP HALF-BLOOD― Annabeth wonders about the future often. More often than necessary.)
Relationships: Annabeth Chase & Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Series: character studies. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1877086
Comments: 10
Kudos: 99





	your eyes look like coming home.

**Author's Note:**

> i. no beta reader this time. just me and my thoughts.

She doesn’t know her future.

# 

* * *

“Horses should totally have their own society, though. They’re smart enough to run it―uh, at least, I _think_ they’re smart enough―”

“Can’t you talk to horses?”

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I actually _know_ ―”

“So you don’t, like, analyze their intelligence or anything? Who’s worthy to be a politician? To run a horse society? You don’t analyze, like, at all?”

“No. Do you?”

“All the time.”

“A _horse’s_ intelligence?”

Annabeth frowns, rotates her head, feels the bristled grass tickle her ear, notices Percy’s eyes surveying the sky. They’re lazing in a meadow, pastures of strawberries expanding and lengthening and elongating for miles. She can hear the campers squabbling about the veracious, flawless, diligent method of agriculture, but mercifully, they’re too distant to intrude in her time alone with Percy.

The corners of his mouth are upturned, ludicrously soft and incomparable to even the most impeccable monuments. One of his hands rests under his head, the other lounging on the grass, so empty and bare without something to embrace. Like his ballpoint pen.

(Or her hand. Either one works.)

“Do you count as a horse?” she asks, considering.

Percy scoffs, nudging her knee with his. She hopes he doesn’t know how his effortless touches makes her heart flutter.

She hopes he never knows.

(She hopes that one day, he will.)

“Wow. Thanks, Wise Girl,” he mutters under his breath, but there’s warmth in his voice. There’s a subtle smile that sets in his face, brief movements and gestures she’s evaluated and retained, reactions only she knows about.

Percy’s a language of laughs and smiles and jokes. Annabeth memorizes every preposterous belief, every distressed furrow of his brow, every splenetic outburst, every irrationally comical plan that actually _works._ His phrases, his syllables, his double meanings―she commits them all to memory. She wants to learn about Percy without reviewing sticky notes or bulletin boards or mind maps or flash cards. To just learn how to _understand_ his language.

She wants to speak it.

(She wants to be the only one to ever speak it.)

“Wait a second,” Percy says abruptly. “ _Am_ I a horse?”

Annabeth stares at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I mean―” he swishes his hand vaguely in the air “―I _could_ be. I, like, talk to horses. I can understand them. I’m pretty sure Pegasus was my brother or something. _Is_ my brother. He’s alive, right?”

“Percy―”

“And I know I don’t look it, but can I have some, like, horse DNA in me? Or something? I wonder how many monsters I fought that were my, like, half-siblings. Or cousins twice removed. Or, uh, something. How does this work?”

“Hey, can you hear that?” Annabeth asks, cupping a palm to her ear.

Percy frowns, leaning his head to the side. It’s adorable. In an aggravating, irritating way. “Hear what?”

“The sound of me ignoring every stupid word you say.”

His face splits into a grin. “Oh come on. You can’t tell me you never thought about this.”

“Past campers never thought about it, so I don’t either.”

“You never just think about all the weird history the Greeks had?”

Annabeth tilts her chin up to the sky again, watching a flock of birds soaring through the clouds, wings spread, surrounded by nothing. Surrounded by no limits. “I like to think about the future.”

“The future?” he asks suspiciously. Uncomfortably. Uneasily.

“Yeah.” Annabeth idly fidgets with her camp necklace, the pad of her finger stroking across the beads. “You know. Like where am I going to attend college?”

Percy pauses before saying, “I was thinking you’d go to Harvard.”

“Maybe.” Annabeth drags her nails over the college ring her father gifted her. She taps it. Squeezes it tight. “I’ll attract too much attention, though. To monsters, I mean.”

“You can handle it,” he says with unnerving conviction. Like he’s standing on a soapbox. Like he’s declaring it as a statement. Like he’s trying to convince her.

“You know I can,” she forces herself to say, because her pride is perilously, inexplicably high, and yet there’s a voice in the back of her head, pondering if she did have the resilience to battle each monster-filled day and live like nothing had happened. “Is there a college you want to go to?”

Percy laughs a little. “You know what? I never...I never really thought about it.”

_Because we might not live long, anyway._

The unspoken reality hangs heavily above them.

She doesn’t want to die.

(She doesn’t want _him_ to die.)

“Why do you think about the future? Isn’t it...I don’t know, scary?”

“Our lives…” she trails off and rethinks, knowing there’s a possibility that he’ll interrupt her elucidation of life and philosophy, but then she stops herself, because this is _Percy,_ and in all of her psycho-analyzations of him, he would never mock her, would never say she’s using too many words or thinking too investigatively. He would never, because that’s just not how his language works.

(She understands him better than she thought.)

Annabeth clears her throat and tries again. “Our futures―well, um, our futures are unsteady if we don’t think about them. If we don’t―don’t think about them every so often, how can we be sure we’ll make a mark in history? Or...or how can we ensure that we’ll be remembered? That we’ll be noticed? That we’ll―that―that _they’ll_ be permanent?”

Percy waits a few seconds, letting her words sink into his mind, allowing them to nestle and bury themselves in the depths, latching onto him, just how she predicted they would. “Is that why you want to be an architect? To, uh, build something permanent? Something stable?”

Annabeth blinks. Looks at him. _Really_ looks at him.

She wonders if she told him that before.

(She wonders if she’s also a language. She wonders if he’s trying to learn it.)

“Yeah,” she says breezily. “Something like that.”

“What else do you think about?” Percy absently asks her, always invested in her thoughts. No one else was ever invested. “For the future, I mean?”

Annabeth thinks. Thinks hard. She has an answer in mind, but it’s on her tongue before she can take it back. “Family.”

“Oh.”

 _Oh._ That simple, simple _oh._

Between them, family has a whole different definition than just _family._

The conversation’s steering into recognizable, risky territory. A topic that has been vicious to the both of them, and every single time they drove back to it, the same thorns would prick their fingers, because they never, _never_ learned. Two of the most quick-witted, impressive demigods alive, and yet this conversation is their sore point, impaired and bloodied and never, _never_ healed.

Percy finally turns his head around, his eyes fanned by long eyelashes, his mouth frowning at her, any trace of a smile long gone. Strands of black hair fall on his rosy cheek. She has the sudden urge to swipe them away. “You’re going to face him sooner or later,” he says.

“I know.”

“You know we have to―that _I_ ―”

“I know.” She does know. She doesn’t want to think about it. “I’m more worried about you.”

“What?”

“I’m more worried about you,” she repeats, but she doesn’t have to repeat herself. It just felt like the right thing to say. “You have...you got a lot on your shoulders. I can’t―I can’t imagine the kind of pressure you’re under.” That's a lie. She can imagine it. She has the gray streak in her hair to prove it. “Just...just know that you’re not alone. You got the entire camp beside you.”

(He had _her_ beside him.)

Percy moves his hand a fraction to her. Then it pulls back. He faces the sky.

He’s still worried, she notices. He’s still afraid. With war looming over their heads, it’s difficult not to be. They lost Castor last year. They lost Lee. Pan. Daedalus. There were more, she remembers, but she doesn’t want to think about them. She doesn’t want to remember Pollux’s sobs of grief, the Apollo Cabin’s grim faces, the entire camp in mourning. It reminds her of memories that should’ve stayed buried at the bottom of Half-Blood Hill.

“Thanks,” he murmurs in the middle of her thinking, the only light that introduces itself to her. “Thanks, Annabeth.”

# 

* * *

(She wants him to be her future.)

**Author's Note:**

> i. this was meant to be a scene that i kept to myself, but i loved it too much to not share it.
> 
> ii. it's short, i know, but i also wrote it in under five hours right before the first day of going back to school, so really, i'm an angel.
> 
> iii. title is from the song everything has changed by taylor swift ft. ed sheeran.
> 
> iv. feel free to request ships and prompts! i'm open to a lot of ships, so don't be afraid to ask.
> 
> [tumblr](https://lovely-verisimilitude.tumblr.com/)


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